Hot Topics:

Audio record describes Allegiant incident

Not much drama in March event well south of Loveland

By Tom Hacker Reporter-Herald Staff Writer

Posted:
11/29/2012 04:50:11 PM MST

Loveland airport director Jason Licon's bush-beating search for any shred of evidence that the airport is unsafe, as Allegiant Air's CEO suggested in October, has turned up exactly one piece of information.

And he had to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Aviation Administration to learn about Allegiant Flight 110 on March 9, and its 10-second diversion to avoid another plane near Longmont.

The aviation agency took six weeks to provide an audio recording on a compact disc, detailing radio transmissions between Longmont-based FAA controllers and the crew of the Allegiant MD-80 jetliner.

Traffic Control Issues Remain

City officials in Fort Collins and Loveland, and the director of the airport they own, are working with a consultant to recruit another commercial carrier to serve the region.

Safety improvements at the airport, including the possibility of building a control tower, will be essential as the airport grows, airport director Jason Licon said.

"Our airport's unique and diverse traffic mix, and the growth that we're starting to see again, mean that we're going to be needing some kind of air traffic control solution in the future," Licon said. "These things are becoming a necessity."

Allegiant, after 10 years of low-cost service that connected Fort Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport with Las Vegas and Phoenix, abruptly announced in late August it would pull the plug on those routes.

The airline offered no explanation, despite repeated requests from city officials, and the last Allegiant flight, a nearly empty plane bound for Las Vegas, departed Oct. 29.

'Lots of Small Airplanes'

But the air carrier's chairman and CEO, Maurice Gallagher, said in a hotel-lobby interview with a Las Vegas reporter in early October that the airline's decision was based partly on the lack of air traffic control.

Gallagher said the Loveland service was profitable, but "you have no tower there, and there are lots of small airplanes flying around, and you don't know where they're at."

The audio recording documenting last spring's event contains little in the way of drama.

"You have to listen hard to make sense of it," said Licon, himself an experienced pilot. "We had to listen to it about eight times just to figure out what happened."

The barely-audible recording tells of how an Allegiant pilot diverted from an inbound flight path south of Loveland to avoid getting too close to what Licon gathered was a small plane doing aerobatic maneuvers in the area.

10-second Response

The crew had been alerted by their onboard collision avoidance system, a silent display on a flat screen.

"It took about 10 seconds," Licon said. "That was it. That's all."

The recorded incident happened more than a full minute before the Allegiant plane entered the Fort Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport airspace.

"A full minute, at 300 knots ... you do the math," Licon said.

The plane would have traveled about six miles during that time, meaning the incident happened in the vicinity of Berthoud-Longmont, well south of the Loveland airport.

Licon said his conversations with FAA safety division staffers, and with controllers at the agency's regional air traffic control center in Longmont, had yielded no evidence of problems at Fort Collins-Loveland.

No Special Treatment

But the agency's safety division suggested the FOIA action, and Licon submitted the request in writing.

"It's not like we got any preferential treatment," he said.

The traffic collision avoidance system reports are so routine that airline passengers are seldom aware of them, and they happen frequently in crowded airspace, such as that found around Denver International Airport.

"It's something that pilots run into on a daily basis," Licon said. "At DIA, with the parallel runways, they happen every day."

Licon said he remained frustrated by Allegiant's refusal to offer any official explanation for their exit, or any advice about safety issues.

"Unless you're told of a problem, there's no way to fix it," Licon said, adding that the FAA report "is useful to me in the sense that it shows our airport is safe."

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.